China’s A.I. Advances Help Its Tech Industry, and State Security<br />Even some global companies are impressed: Delphi, a major American auto supplier, offers iFlyTek’s technology to carmakers in China,<br />while Volkswagen plans to build the Chinese company’s speech recognition technology into many of its cars in China next year.<br />“The Chinese government has been collecting the voice patterns of tens of thousands of people with little transparency about the program or laws regulating who can be targeted or how<br />that information is going to be used,” Sophie Richardson, Human Rights Watch’s China director, wrote in a report in October.<br />China “does not have the stringent privacy laws that Western companies have, nor are Chinese citizens against having their data collected, as (arguably<br />speaking) government monitoring is a fact of China,” analysts with the research firm Sanford C. Bernstein wrote in a report in November.<br />“But due to the advantage of a huge amount of users and China’s social governance, A. I.<br />will develop faster and spread from China to the world.”<br />An iFlyTek spokeswoman said the company had yet to receive required permission from officials<br />in Anhui, the Chinese province where it is based, to speak with the foreign news media.<br />Mr. Liu, the head of iFlyTek’s automotive business, said<br />that the company’s systems would be installed next year in some Jeeps sold in China and that it was developing automotive voice systems with Daimler, which owns the Mercedes-Benz brand.<br />In an October report, a human rights group said the company was helping the authorities compile a<br />biometric voice database of Chinese citizens that could be used to track activists and others.
